There’s a reason why they ask non-immigrants applying for visas if they’re involved in espionage, sabotage, terrorist activities, genocide, and/or are Nazis on the run. You see, people who do such things are quite often on the run from them, and/or covering their activities up. When either situation comes to light unexpectedly it’s very helpful for the government to be able to have a piece of paper that proved that the suddenly-unwelcome visitor has clearly lied about his/her activities. The alternative would be to do extensive background checks on everybody who wants to enter the country on a visit: that either takes time, or giving the NSA about twenty times its current budget. I wonder how many people over at Cracked.com want either of those things to happen…

Moe Lane

PS: Probably the submitter thought that the Nazi thing was absurd. It is my admittedly hard-nosed opinion that the truly absurd thing is that Europe is tired of taking back the WWII Nazis that we still find from time to time, and try to deport. Admittedly, it will stop being a problem in about ten more years, but still.

2 Comments

#14’s not actually ridiculous either. As I recall, back in the dark ages, say around 2000 or so, tech companies issued tons of options, that might or might not be worth the bits they were stored in, and companies didn’t have to report them as a liability or expense until they were actually exercised, which, if they stayed underwater, was never, or if the person left before they vested was also never. Some people didn’t like this, because they felt that these companies were carrying around huge liabilities that didn’t appear on the balance sheet. And this isn’t entirely an unfair view (although to me it was silly because the numbers were still out there for investors to look at in the filings ,just not in the bottom line). So the rules got changed, and as a result most tech companies switched over wholesale from granting options to just granting a reduced amount of stock directly. Facebook decided to go the other way because it doesn’t actually care about its stock price. Not enough of the company is owned externally to force them to change, either.